Complex

Susan Eisenhower, in crossing the party line to endorse Obama for president, invokes Ike's most enduring phrase:

In his televised [farewell] address, Ike famously coined the term "military-industrial complex," and he offered advice that is still relevant today. "As we peer into society's future," he said, we "must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow."

She goes on to list the modern problems she sees confronting America:

Today we are engaged in a debate about these very issues. Deep in America's heart, I believe, is the nagging fear that our best years as a nation may be over. We are disliked overseas and feel insecure at home. We watch as our federal budget hemorrhages red ink and our civil liberties are eroded. Crises in energy, health care and education threaten our way of life and our ability to compete internationally. There are also the issues of a costly, unpopular war; a long-neglected infrastructure; and an aging and increasingly needy population.

Which is perhaps crafted to show up the resemblance of America's present anxieties to the problems Eisenhower faced as president. But she quickly and wisely turns from Eisenhower to Obama, and gives a good catalogue of his appealing qualities. But I'm still interested in Eisenhower. Perhaps more so than his granddaughter is. Not that that's a slam; I probably don't understand my own grandfather as well as some other people did, either. (But she also uses "transpire" incorrectly).

She could have stuck with that farewell speech a little longer. It really is a great one, by modern presidential standards. It's short and rich. The whole thing is here. And it's inspiring. Obama often gets compared to JFK, but the rhetoric in Ike's farewell is as inspiring as anything JFK offered:

Throughout America's adventure in free government, such basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among peoples and among nations.

To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people.

Any failure traceable to arrogance or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us a grievous hurt, both at home and abroad.

Uplifting patriotic words! But they might trouble the waters for a modern Democratic candidate, who will have to depend so much for support on a wedge of the party base that is dead-set on pulling away from enhancing liberty, dignity and integrity in at least one Middle Eastern nation. Indeed, Eisenhower sounds positively ... Neo-Conish. With a "religion" reference thrown in to chill the spines of fundie-haters.

Susan Eisenhower opens by refering to the speech's most famous line, but then steers pretty well clear of it for the rest of her piece. I can understand that, too. Military-Industrial Complex is one of those American expressions (like "manifest destiny" or "pursuit of happiness") which has been taken into the national phraseology but without much reference to what the person meant who first wrote it.

His farewell speech was not "about" the MIC. It introduced that topic in its course. Eisenhower was talking about the overweening growth of government power -- both in fact and in the minds of the citizens, in the first stage of the Cold War. In my opinion, he was right to sound that alarm. Here's grandpa Eisenhower, speaking in the year after I was born:

Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in the newer elements of our defenses; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research – these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.

But each proposal must be weighed in light of a broader consideration; the need to maintain balance in and among national programs – balance between the private and the public economy, balance between the cost and hoped for advantages – balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between the actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.

Government economy as a consideration in policy-making. What an idea!

The military naturally came in for attention in the speech. For one, his party had been defeated in the 1960 election in part because its opponents had attacked it for not spending enough on the military to fight the Cold War. Ike was a Republican; the Democrats were the hawks. But Ike knew two things JFK did not: 1. Khrushchev was bluffing about the size and potency of the Russian arsenal; 2. thermonuclear weapons and missile systems had changed warfare entirely since 1950 and made a real war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. too destructive to be likely. Kennedy realized the first once he became president; I wonder if he ever really grasped the second.

Ike wasn't just a soldier; he had led the armies, and he had seen how industrial munitions makers manipulated the supply system to their benefit. He also had seen how civilian politicians foisted pork-barrel military projects on an army and navy that didn't want or need them. In fact, until the last minute, the phrase eisenhower was going to use in his speech was "military-industrial-congressional complex." He is said to have revised his speechwriters' words to avoid angering Congress, where his party still had a base of power.

But Eisenhower didn't stop at the MIC. There were other evolving "complexes" in the American body, mutating out of the federal government, that he warned against:

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

"Scientific-technological elite" somehow hasn't gripped the public imagination the way "military-industrial complex" did. But they weighed equally in his warning to us. A yearning for blackboards over computers is quaint. But the corruption of academic institutions by government money during the Cold War never has been undone, and what was lost is more lamentable than blackboards.

Now, Obama has his attractive qualities and may well make a good president, or even a great one. But whether he -- or anyone now running -- is fit or willing to correct the drift Eisenhower identified in modern American history is a doubtful thing.



[Yeah, I know ... Ron Paul]

Eisenhower's Ghost

When President Bush visited Hungary, he helped the nation commemorate its failed 1956 uprising against Soviet domination. But Charles Gati wrote that a Clinton-style apology would have been more in order:

The truth is that at a critical juncture in the Cold War, when Hungarians rose against their Soviet oppressors, the United States abandoned them. After 13 days of high drama, hope and despair, the mighty Soviet army prevailed. For its part, Washington offered a sad variation on "NATO": no action, talk only. The Eisenhower administration's policy of "liberation" and "rollback" turned out to be a hoax -- hypocrisy mitigated only by self-delusion. The more evident, if unstated, goal was to roll back the Democrats from Capitol Hill rather than liberate Central and Eastern Europe from Soviet tyranny.

Gati is an academic and a researcher. It is apparent from his column that he's formed his opinions about 1956 at least in part from digging he's done in the CIA's archives to research a book. They also owe much, it seems, to material from Soviet archives that were available to researchers after the fall of the USSR.

We now know from Russian archives that the Hungarians did have a chance to gain some of what they sought.

I have every sympathy with the Hungarians. I remember reading a white paper account of the events of 1956 when I was a teenager and thinking it was one of the great tragedies of the Cold War. And seeing how the Red Army brought in its Asian units to grind the boot down on genuine factory workers gave the lie to the whole cardboard edifice of Marxist-Leninist rhetoric.

But Gati seems to me to be in violation of one of my cardinal rules: In judging the acts and words of people of the past, judge from what they knew, not what you know now.

The United States, according to the usual version of what happened, could not help the Hungarians because any action would have triggered a military confrontation with Moscow. This explanation misses the point: There were actions short of war that Washington might have taken. It could certainly have urged the Hungarians to temporize and pursue limited, evolutionary goals. It could have taken the issue to the United Nations before, and not after, the Soviet crackdown. In an imaginative move toward post-Stalin detente, it could have proposed immediate talks about withdrawing American forces from a small Western European country in exchange for Soviet withdrawal from Hungary.

Instead, Gati writes, and probably correctly, "[T]he United States had no means available to aid, let alone 'liberate,' Hungary. For despite all the talk about 'liberation' since 1952, neither the National Security Council nor the State Department had devised plans for diplomatic or any other form of assistance. Nor was the CIA ready."

Thanks to people like Gati, we know what the American and Soviet leaders of 1956 said among themselves. But they couldn't hear each other at the time.

Gati says other U.S. approaches to the Hungary crisis would have succeeded. But even after you've read all the archives, you don't know that. Once you take a single step outside the historical flow of events, once you introduce a single "what-if," the butterfly effect kicks in and the entire course of events becomes utterly unpredictable.

It is possible to see similarities between the 1956 uprisings in Poland and Hungary and the events of 1989: A new leader in the East was denouncing old tyrants, admitting mistakes, and promising more openness and better lives for people. Subject populations reacted by rising up not only against their local overlords but the entire Soviet system.

But the similarities mask deep differences. Khrushchev, for instance, was under intense pressure from Mao not to let the Soviet system run off the rails. The audacity, or genius -- or luck -- of Reagan was to see that the moment had come to press against the rotten regime. The mass rising from below in Eastern Europe was strong enough in 1989, and the change at the top was real enough, and the hollowness of the regimes was so advanced, that the circumstances were just right.

But the main thing Gati seems to have forgotten is the awful dilemma that chilled every day of the Cold War. Every international crisis brought a risk of nuclear annihilation. After a few of them in the first post-war years, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. learned to avoid them -- without making that too obviously the main rule of the game.

Stability always is the ideal for world powers, in any era, but in the Cold War it became the only guarantee of survival. Both sides, though they occasionally tested each other (especially at times of a change in administration in Washington) quickly retreated into the fetish for stability. When the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, Kennedy in public used it as an excuse to, correctly, lambaste the Soviet "worker's paradise" ideal as a sham. But privately he accepted it: "It's not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war."

The U.S. invested thousands of lives and millions of dollars in maintaining a status quo that was morally indefensible and that compromised our ideals. We muzzled our commitment to democracy and embraced dictators if they pronounced themselves anti-communists. And what was the inhumane doctrine of "mutually assured destruction" but hostage-taking on a global scale?

It was a system that elevated stability over justice. What was the alternative? Bold moves only drove the world closer to the thermonuclear precipice. Before it's all forgotten, let someone write down the helpless terror felt by average people during the Cuban Missile Crisis; how my parents said good-bye to each other every morning as he went to work, crying and thinking this would be the day the skies blossomed obliteration all over them.

The Cold War need to deter a nuclear war at all costs short of surrender evolved in the minds of leaders from being a temporary and very regrettable condition, to a necessity, to a proper relationship, and finally to a positive good.

In 1956, it had at least reached the level of "necessity." John Foster Dulles said in a public interview during the crisis that American military intervention to free the Hungarians would "precipitate a full-scale world war and probably the result would be all these people wiped out."

The lines had congealed on the map when the armies halted in 1945. As Gati writes the rhetoric was launched over the barbed wire, but not the soldiers. Dean Rusk, later and in another context, said what happened in Eastern Europe had "never been an issue of war and peace between us and the Soviet Union -- however ignoble this sounds."

Do you wonder why some of us literally felt born-again in 1989, and why we still prefer the current idealistic follies in the name of freedom and gambles on nation-building? Better that than the grim death match grappling of the Cold War. Yet many people yearn for the "balance" of the past, and want something/anything -- Europe, the U.N., even the Islamists -- to rise up and force America to back down and return to all talk, no action.

Gati rails against the hypocrisy of an America that talked a good game of liberation and the rights of people everywhere to live free, but was unwilling to put any muscle into the promises:

The president should tell the Hungarians that in the 1950s Congress issued politically inspired "Captive Nations" resolutions and held self-satisfying "prayer breakfasts," while Eisenhower delivered empty promises about "liberation" during presidential campaigns in 1952 and 1956 to please Hungarian (and other Eastern European) ethnics in Ohio and elsewhere -- with no plans to carry them out.

The Hungarians need to hear what happened 50 years ago -- and Americans need to hear that in the future we will not say we seek clearly unattainable goals abroad for political ends at home.

That's an artful conclusion. It can be read two ways: "We should back up our talk with robust action," or "we should stop talking about freedom being a human right since we're not sincere about helping make it happen."